I first encountered Judge Stephen Reinhardt as a second-year law student at New York University, when he delivered the annual “Madison Lecture” on campus in 1998. I had heard of Judge Reinhardt and knew that he was an important liberal voice in an increasingly conservative federal judiciary — the “Chief Justice of the Warren court in exile,” as his former clerk Michael Dorf had described him. But I wasn’t at all prepared for the bluntness of his critique of current trends in jurisprudence. The Rehnquist Supreme Court, he said, would be remembered for having erected “arcane and almost impenetrable procedural rules” that elevated process over substantive rights, “especially those of racial minorities.” He continued: “One can only contemplate with dread the answer the current Court would have given had it been asked to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson.”

I wanted to work for a judge like that — one who pulled no punches when publicly castigating his putative superiors. (I would learn soon enough, when I became one of his law clerks, that Judge Reinhardt pulled no punches when talking to anyone­, and that thick skin could be a valuable attribute in his chambers.) My ACLU colleague Hector Villagra recounts his own path to a Reinhardt clerkship. “I wanted to work for the judge who wrote Gutierrez” — a case in which Judge Reinhardt struck down an “English-only” workplace rule in a Los Angeles municipal court. No doubt many of the 150 law clerks who worked for Judge Reinhardt during his four decades on the bench can describe a similar inspiration. We certainly didn’t take the job for the hours!

Judge Reinhardt was one of the hardest working judges on the federal bench, and he expected his clerks to work equally hard. That work included not only a heavy load of bench memos and draft opinions but also a nonstop blizzard of email correspondence with the other judges of the Ninth Circuit. Because the judge lived 87 years without once touching a keyboard, there was a never-ending stream of law clerks going in and out of his chambers, dropping off fresh drafts and leaving with bruised egos and marked-up manuscripts.

While we sometimes joked that clerking for Judge Reinhardt was the price one paid for the lifelong privilege of being his former clerk, the truth is that we were all in awe of his brilliance, his drive, and his commitment to using the law to protect the powerless. He is best known for his opinions (and dissents) in landmark cases involving marriage equality, reproductive freedom, the separation of church and state, and the right to determine the time and manner of one’s own death. But Judge Reinhardt treated every case in which an individual was at the mercy of coercive state power as a landmark case.

The federal courts hear thousands of appeals each year from immigrants facing deportation, prisoners challenging their convictions, and civil rights litigants whose complaints have been cursorily dismissed, and the sheer volume of judicial caseloads means that not every appeal gets searching scrutiny. In Judge Reinhardt’s chambers, they all did. And in an era in which the Supreme Court had erected so many procedural barriers to the consideration of constitutional claims, finding the narrow pathways to relief for litigants whose rights had been violated required both diligence and ingenuity. Judge Reinhardt taught us that to succeed, we had to outwork and outsmart the proponents of injustice and intolerance.

Death penalty cases, in particular, showed Judge Reinhardt at his finest. He made no secret of his personal abhorrence about being part of a system that extinguished human life. Any time an execution was scheduled in any of the states of the Ninth Circuit, the judge and his clerks would stay in chambers until the final moments in case there was a last-minute appeal. He invariably dissented, sometimes alone, when the court failed to halt an execution. While he acknowledged being bound by Supreme Court precedents upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty, he once told me that he had “yet to see a death penalty case without reversible error.” I regret that he didn’t live to see that barbaric punishment abolished once and for all.

It’s particularly galling that we’ve lost Judge Reinhardt at precisely the time in our nation’s history when we need him most. (And it’s fitting that his children have instructed mourners that in lieu of flowers they should send contributions to the ACLU, where so many of his former clerks have worked, as well as his beloved wife Ramona Ripston, who served as the executive director of the ACLU of Southern California for almost 40 years.) The Trump presidency is the kind of democratic stress test that demands an active and principled judiciary. Judge Reinhardt was no Pollyanna — he would be the very last person to offer bland reassurances about how everything will work out in the end. But he was no pessimist, either. He genuinely believed that a more just and more humane world was achievable, and that our work, even in the face of calamitous setbacks, remained vitally important. I’ll close where I began, by quoting at length from the Madison lecture which Judge Reinhardt delivered almost 20 years ago. I can’t think of a better tribute to him or a more pressing message for us.

Although we are not in a period in which we can expect . . . immediate positive changes, it is nevertheless the duty of the academy and the legal profession to make the record that will be necessary when the pendulum swings. And the pendulum will surely swing — not only with respect to our death penalty jurisprudence, and the harsh and inflexible means by which we today limit the historic writ of habeas corpus, but also with respect to the inimical manner in which the majority of today's judges view individual rights. Those of us who still believe in the obligation of the courts to ensure fairness and equality for all, who share the concerns that dominated the brightly shining jurisprudence of the Warren-Brennan era, who believe that we are now in a valley in our long legal journey towards justice, may not be around to see the day when our judicial system returns to its state of glory. Obviously, this is not one of the proudest times in our nation's history — for any of our branches of government. It will take time to recover, to undo the damage, to heal the constitutional wounds. In the case of the Supreme Court, given the nature of the appointive process and the practical realities of lifetime tenure, the period required for fundamental change is a lengthy one.

Change will not come easily. It will take hard work on the part of well-trained advocates and creative legal thinkers who refuse to accept the notion that the era of judicial progress is forever over and who will inspire those who learn from their words and deeds. . . .

If we have faith in the nature of humanity, if we believe that the course of evolution is progress, if we are truly committed to the principles of liberty, equality, and justice, I am confident that we can return to an era in which the courts serve as the guardians of the values embodied in our Constitution, to an era in which judicial protection of the rights of the poor and the disadvantaged will once again be the order of the day. If we have the will and the determination, we will ultimately prevail.

It’s heartening to see, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, growing skepticism about how Facebook handles data and data privacy. But we should take this opportunity to ask the bigger, harder questions, too — questions about discrimination and division, and whether we want to live in a society where our consumer data profile determines our reality.

In the spring of 2016, a Facebook executive gave a presentation about the success of Facebook’s then-new “ethnic affinity” advertising categories. Facebook had grouped users as white, Black, or Latino based on what they had clicked, and this targeting had allowed the movie “Straight Outta Compton” to be marketed as two completely different films. For Black audiences, it was a deeply political biopic about the members of N.W.A. and their music, framed by contemporary reflections from Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. For white audiences, it was a scripted drama about gangsters, guns, and cops that barely mentioned the names of its real-life characters. From the perspective of Universal Pictures, this dual marketing had been wildly successful. “Straight Outta Compton” earned over $160 million at the U.S. box office.

When we saw this news in 2016, it immediately raised alarm bells about the effect of such categories on civil rights. We went straight to Facebook with our immediate concern: How was the company ensuring that ads for jobs, housing, and employment weren’t targeted by race, given that such targeting is illegal under the civil rights laws? Facebook didn’t have an answer. We worked with officials from the company for more than a year on solutions that, as it turned out, were not properly implemented. Facebook still makes it possible for advertisers to target based on categories closely linked to gender, family status, and disability, and the company has recently gotten sued for it.

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To make matters worse, the government is actively turning a blind eye. The New York Times reported on Thursday that, under Secretary Ben Carson, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development dropped its investigation into whether Facebook’s ad targeting system violated the Fair Housing Act. That means that HUD, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of that law, is choosing to put its head in the sand rather than investigate whether civil rights laws have been broken.

It’s not illegal to market “Straight Outta Compton” differently based on race (as opposed to say, a housing or employment ad). Nonetheless, that tactic creates a distinction among people and treats them differently as a result. And these kinds of distinctions have real-world effects: Think about what it means to white teenagers to see a trailer with yet another image of criminal Black men, instead of hearing Dr. Dre reflect on police brutality in the 1980s and today.

Then magnify that effect hundreds and thousands of times. In today’s world, a huge proportion of the advertising and media that we see reaches us based on accumulated data about us. If ad targeting means that my family and yours hear and read about different movies and TV shows, will that make it impossible for America to have another cross-racial Roots moment? (In 1977, 130 million Americans watched at least part of the famous miniseries tracing a Black family’s journey from Africa to slavery to the present day.)

Targeting, of course, does enable advertisers — including the ACLU — to efficiently reach particular audiences with messages that are tailored to them, and that can sometimes be a good thing. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge what’s lost with that efficiency: that people outside of the expected audiences won’t see these messages or know they exist.

Ad targeting can make the world look different to different people. Some find the web full of job ads for high-paying CEO jobs, while others see mostly ads for sneakers or payday loans. Our news also reaches us and our networks through ad targeting. How can this not have huge implications for our ability to exist in a cohesive society? How can we agree on the policies that should govern our world when there are no common reference points for what that world looks like?

It’s not just foreign interference and voter suppression campaigns that make this kind of targeting so dangerous for democracy.

When Bethany Webb’s sister, Laura, was killed in a mass shooting in 2011, she couldn’t imagine things getting worse. But then-District Attorney Tony Rackauckas of Orange County, California, took the case.

In his zeal to impose the death penalty — over Webb’s objection — Rackauckas employed jailhouse informants to elicit damning statements from the defendant, Scott Dekraai, while Dekraai was in jail. These informant-defendant interactions violated the Constitution’s right to counsel — no one is allowed to interrogate defendants without their attorneys present. Rackauckas knew that what he was doing was illegal, but he did it anyway. And it wasn’t the first time Rackauckas had broken the law in pursuit of a conviction.

In fact, Rackauckas and Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens had overseen a systematic, methodical program of using jailhouse informants for years. Their era of impunity ended only in 2014, when Dekraai’s attorney uncovered their illegal jailhouse informant program. Remarkably, even after their unlawful acts were discovered, Rackauckas, Hutchens, and their employees denied it, going so far as to lie about it under oath to Orange County judges and juries.

Rackauckas’ and Hutchens’ illegal acts corrupted the entire system, making it impossible for crime victims to achieve closure, defendants to receive due process, and the community to trust those charged with protecting them. When law enforcement cheats, we all lose.

Now, seven years after Laura Webb was killed, Bethany Webb, the sister of a murder victim, has joined forces with the ACLU, the ACLU of Southern California, People for the Ethical Operation of Prosecution and Law Enforcement, and the law offices of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, to end this illegal and destructive informant program.

The Orange County informant program has three primary components, all of which violate the law. First, Orange County deputy sheriffs cultivate relationships with professional jailhouse informants. These informants are facing serious jail time themselves, and therefore have a strong incentive to enter the employ of law enforcement.

Once incarcerated men become informants, the Sheriff’s Department places them strategically near target criminal defendants awaiting trial, and the informants proceed to extract incriminating information. The informants then trade that information for jailhouse perks, vast sums of money, and, most importantly, time off their sentences from the district attorney. For example, deputy sheriffs paid one set of Mexican Mafia informants $150,000 over 18 months.

Second, informants often use threats of violence to get the information they need, in violation of defendants’ due process rights. In some cases, informants with a history of violence told defendants that if the defendants did not admit involvement in the crime with which they were charged, they would be assaulted or even executed on sight. For many, the choice was clear: confess or die. The unreliability of such coerced, involuntary confessions is part of why the Supreme Court has prohibited the tactic.

Third, to ensure the illegal informant program remains secret, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office has routinely suppressed all information about it. The office is happy to use the illegally extracted information to secure convictions; it just doesn’t want anyone, especially defendants and their attorneys, to know that the information was illegally obtained. Indeed, officials have lied under oath keep this program secret.

This systematic failure to disclose favorable material information to defense counsel — who should have the chance to cross-examine the informants on the tactics they use and benefits they receive — violates the U.S. and California Constitutions, as well as statutory disclosure obligations in the California Penal Code.

Rackauckas and Hutchens have been breaking the law in this way for years because they are more concerned with securing convictions than serving justice. To put a stop to their lawlessness and lack of accountability, we have filed a lawsuit to bring to light the full extent of the illegal program, including all cases, like the Webb case, that have been tainted. We are also seeking court orders to halt the program immediately, and to require the District Attorney and Sheriff’s Department to undertake concrete, lasting reforms to ensure that such a miscarriage of justice cannot happen again.

Last year, the ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice announced a new, multi-year initiative to make sure that prosecutors like Tony Rackauckas who break the law, and those like Sandra Hutchens who enable them, are held accountable, while those who obey the law and support their communities are lifted up. The public demands it. A recent ACLU national poll found that 95 percent of respondents support the idea that a prosecutor engaged in misconduct should be held accountable.

This lawsuit is the part of that effort, as we work toward much-needed reductions in mass incarceration and reforms in the criminal justice system nationwide.